Beyond logic

Gurdeep Singh's canvases brood with energy - alternately menacing and playful.

India defies the whole movement of abstract art, largely because its subconscious impulses are fired by a tradition of decoration and beauty, even of voluptuousness, an ideal of plenty, of richness as much as of lushness, of colour. Few artists have been able to work against sensibility of form, something Gurdeep Singh confesses he started with, but as he stood before his canvas, contemplating his outlines, he says, “I lost interest in the figurative.”

There is a precocious energy to Singh’s works — most particularly his large canvases that are flourishes of seething movement. “It is very vigorous brushwork,” he agrees, “once I’m on a roll, I paint in a manner that there is going to be no second chance” — the implication is of correcting mistakes — “and it is difficult to manage harmony and composition in canvases that are large”: such as the one that is 18 feet across, a lavish scale that defies any physicality but is a cauldron, almost, of charged emotions.

Not surprisingly, Singh — a student of science, and of psychology, before he turned to fine art — is no disciplined artist. “It is not a job for me,” he says dismissively of the nine-to-five studio routine other artists employ, “I paint when my mind is boiling with emotions, and emotions” — like his art, he is at pains to qualify — “are momentary.” It may seem incredible in today’s times, but Singh is clear that there is nothing premeditated about his work beyond the fugue of a structure, and that he is guided by “intuitive powers”, by “spontaneity”, by “the subconscious”.

When he isn’t painting, he denies that he is therefore removed from any art. “The mind,” he insists, “is always in the process of forming ideas.” Even if abstract art, he says, like music which has no visual form, implies delving beyond known physicalities, he is conscious of the need to control each stroke, else the energy would be explosive. It is his thick brushstrokes that he says his viewers seem most impressed with, this sense of two-dimensional power that “works on the senses so that they feel compelled to touch it”, he laughs, “in a way most would associate with sculpture, not painting”.

Interestingly Singh, who has had solo shows in New York and Munich, besides New Delhi and Mumbai, and whose work is currently on show at Gallerie Nvya in the capital, most enjoys working in black and white, colours that, he says, allow the most gradations. Black, in particular, appeals to him. “It is a never-ending colour,” he says, a metaphor, for instance, for roads that “connect cities, countries, cultures. There is,” he explains, “a sense of something emerging from darkness.”

Yet, he enjoys bursts of colour almost as much, and his canvases explode in a range of primary hues. “Colours are difficult to manage,” he says, “their intensities work against each other. Colour,” he qualifies, “has power.” Interestingly, a form that does manifest itself on his canvases, is calligraphy, of alphabets in Gurmukhi, something that Deborah M Williams, who introduces his work in (un)betoken, the current show, refers to as “both aesthetic and playful”.

The young artist’s works range from Rs 1.25 lakh to Rs 25 lakh, with most works in the range of Rs 5 lakh, and consist, according to Williams, of “intensely emotive brushwork” in “a refreshing contrast”. While that’s true, what stays, long after you’ve seen the paintings, is a sense of intense energy. It could fire your imagination — or destroy it.